Antonio Damasio, a giant in the field of consciousness research, has a fascinating new book, out today: Natural Intelligence & the Logic of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio: 9798217207497 | https://t.co/jwZwwc49BW: Books
Everyone always asks me like with all this AI is anything still the same? And the answer is so far almost everything is exactly the same. The only weird The only weird new thing is that companies have these giant AI bills.
The supercomputer inside our own skull runs on about 25 watts, which hints that the minimum energy needed for intelligence might be small - and that the giant, controversial AI compute centers we're building now may turn out to be a temporary blip rather than a permanent feature.
essentially every cultural attribute that we celebrate – from human rights, to logic, to progress, to the very notion of an independent self – are conceptual children born from the mind-shaping power of the written word.
Maybe as AI writes more and more code of our code, it's less about like the details of how you express logic in a particular programming language and much more about those kinds of high-level trade-offs.
But they wouldn’t destroy the library because it was the giant brain from which the Assyrians ran a world empire, and it had all the knowledge in the world. They destroyed that? They spoke the same language, they had the same writing system. They’d have taken them all safely home, cart after cart after cart.
the reason that I think this is kind of tricky is quite subtle. And it's the fact that anytime you use an LLM to assign a reward, those LLMs are giant things with billions of parameters and they're gameable.
But fundamentally, T-Rex is definitely weird, even compared to all the other giant tyrannosaurs that are very closely related to it, because it is by far, ludicrously by far, the largest carnivore in its ecosystem.
So, giant eyeballs, they can either see very well, they can see a very long way in daylight, or they can see very well at night. And my suspicion is it's the latter. I think they're probably primarily nocturnal when they get that size.
The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.
higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
The biggest limitation that's built up over time is the single-threaded nature of game simulation in Unreal Engine. We run a single-threaded simulation. If you have a 16 core CPU, we're using one core for game simulation and running with the complicated game logic because single-threaded programming is orders of magnitude easier than multi-threaded programming.
But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly.
This book gave me both insight and a deeper curiosity about the subject. This book introduces the SPIN model checker and exposes the reader to the nuances of verifying programs using SPIN. A nice feature of the book is how it explains concepts using thoughtfully developed, freely available tools (such as jSpin) that the author created for pedagogical purposes. It's a demanding book, but the content was interesting. The book presents details about concurrency, temporal logic, non-determinism, advanced SPIN topics, and even case studies. I've already written a few blog posts about the topics I explored while reading this book, and I plan to write more. Overall, it's a good book. I'm sure I'll revisit the latter half again.
Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us.
Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term, that are impossible to solve if you think short-term. And we aren't really good at thinking long-term. Five years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past.
Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.
Brilliant insights into human nature. Moral reasoning, inventing victims, emotional reactions, the elephant (emotions) and its rider (explanations). Intuition reacts then logic confabulates a reason. Survival of the fittest applied to groups. Understanding religion and tradition. Great from start to finish.
This 1992 book changed everything about my life. It’s my Bible. Most of my beliefs come from it. I read it many times at a formative age, but re-read it now 30 years later, taking notes. It’s not a perfect book. It’s too verbose and full of expired American references. But its core messages are the wisest, most effective life philosophy I’ve ever encountered. You choose how you feel. Your emoti…
Another book I wanted to mention in this context is a fairly obvious choice, Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which is a foundational book about the self, in particular because it reconnects emotion with rationality and the body.
I edit podcasts on the Mac in Logic Pro, edit video in Final Cut Pro, and remove noise from audio tracks using iZotope RX 8. I record all my podcasts using Audio Hijack.
The skills US workers learned in the process of becoming an industrial giant helped set the US up for technological leadership over the rest of the century.
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy; he describes his “attractively vague job title” as allowing him the freedom to create a behavioral science practice within the ad agency. This looks intriguing.
The known connection between geometry, logic, topology, and functional programming suggests that the connections between representations and types may be of fundamental significance.
It's hard to learn, but Logic is a beautiful piece of software. It's also hard to learn how to record using real studio equipment, so it should be no surprise that learning how to record with professional quality music software is difficult.
The point of the giant setup is that in my freetime I like running giant network visualizations using NetDraw, a free program written by Steve Borgatti for visualizing both 1-mode and 2-mode social network data.
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